On the 28th and 29th of June, the consortium of the FP7 project SMARTPRO met in Aachen, Germany for its 28-month meeting. It was hosted by the RWTH (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule) Aachen. Partners discussed the recent activities made by each partner to find the best materials to combine with the aim of creating lightweight and flexible body armour. Each partner brought its expertise in the fields of textiles, ballistics, and practical use. The Mossos d’Esquadra also provided important input, sharing their needs with industrialists and researchers to help guide the development process.
About the project: SMARTPRO will develop lightweight and flexible protective clothing, incorporating smart functionalities, designed for daily use by law enforcement authorities.
Modern body armours still have some drawbacks, as they are mostly heavy, bulky, and rigid. This limits the wearer’s mobility and agility and makes them impractical for use on joints, arms, legs, etc. Moreover, body armours have traditionally been designed to protect the wearer against ballistic threats, but they provide only a limited level of protection against knives, sharp blades, or sharp-tipped weapons. Stab and puncture wounds have become a major cause of injuries for police officers. Therefore, there is an obvious need to develop materials that combine both stab and ballistic protection, while retaining their flexibility and low weight.
In this context, SMARTPRO aims to develop optimized ballistic textiles (both woven and spacer-knitted fabrics) and apply innovative surface treatments (e.g., shear thickening fluids, ceramic coatings) to improve their performance based on areal density. This approach will require fewer fabric layers, which is expected to result in increased flexibility and reduced weight of the armour. Key parameters also include physiological comfort and ergonomic design.
Additionally, smart functions, including positioning systems, will be integrated to further increase the efficiency of the body armour, eventually leading to reduced casualties. Finally, while existing protective gear is usually limited to body armour, innovative solutions are being proposed for the protection of vulnerable body parts other than the torso.